In this month's issue of CIO magazine IBM is listed as one of its CIO 100, a list of 100 organizations that over the past year have "generated business value through creative and cutting-edge uses of technology. IBM's submission for the award ? A social tagging service built on top of Lotus Connections Dogear!
I've said it before, and I'll have to say it today. I love Dogear!! It's my favorite search engine, and social tagging is simply awesome. Why is Dogear such an awesome search engine? (In fact, it's so good, that it's my primary search engine now.. and I use Google second!!)
Previously, search was based on keywords. If web developers didn't include appropriate keywords on their pages, then computers would have to crawl and understand the content using Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. Sounds complicated? It is!!!
Social bookmarking and social tagging has changed that! It allows readers (read, humans) to tag pages with whatever words they see fit. And who can better understand content on a computer screen?? Humans of course!!! Therefore, social bookmarking and tagging eliminates that web developer dependency and gives the power back to the searcher. Searchers can now help guide fellow searchers toward content they believe will be relevant to their needs.
Internal surveys show that:
- Social bookmarking and tagging have reduced each internal search by 12 seconds
- There are, on average, 286,568 visits per week, yielding a total of 955 hrs/week in time reduction
IBM calculates the financial benefit of social tagging to be $7.5 million!!!! You can see IBM's Winner Profile here. Congratulations to the social bookmarking and tagging teams.